Joe's Stone Crab, Miami Beach, Florida

I was, I'll admit, a bit nervous about the restaurants in Miami. A couple of American friends had told me that they found the food in Florida "unsophisticated" and "boring" - thankfully, this really wasn't my experience. (Outside the Disney parks, that is, where you will drive yourself mad trying to find something to eat that isn't a pretzel, a sausage of some sort or a funnel cake.) We found some really interesting, innovative eating in and around Miami - traditional American at Michael's Genuine, some great tapas with a very individual twist at Sra. Martinez and a simply astonishing bento box at Naoe, which I'll give its own post later on.

Joe's Stone Crab isn't exactly innovative, having been serving up the same stuff for nearly a hundred years, but it came highly recommended by almost everybody we spoke to. At the southern end of Miami Beach, it's easy to spot by the long line of Aston Martins and Ferraris queuing for the valet parking. The restaurant does not accept reservations. Your best bet is to visit mid-week, or you'll be looking at a two-hour wait for a table. We went on a Thursday lunchtime, and were shown to a table indoors straight away; there was a 30-minute wait for an outdoor table.

Joe's started out in 1913 as a seafood shack. It really came into its own in the 20s, when Joe Weiss discovered that the local stone crabs, previously passed over as inedible, had enormous, sweet, meaty claws. No, I have no idea how such a thing as a crab with giant claws might have come to be ignored by restaurateurs either, but that's the story. These days the place only opens in stone crab season (late October to May), and then offers a reduced service until August. The crab claws are still served cold with the original accompaniments: a sharp, mustardy mayonnaise, a vinegary fresh slaw, hash browns and roasted tomatoes or creamed spinach. There's also a large menu of other seafood, alongside fried chicken and steaks for the fish-phobic.

Despite those cars outside, the remarkable bling encrusting a lot of the women diners and the flotilla of designer labels, you don't have to spend a fortune here, although some care in ordering is required. At lunchtime, the restaurant is offering a recession-busting "Great Lunch Bailout" menu, with a coleslaw starter, three enormous crab claws (trust me - these are so rich you won't want any more), a positive Everglade of garlicky creamed spinach, a big patty of skillet-fried hash browns, the mustard mayonnaise, drawn butter, a slim slice of key lime pie and a coffee. The whole lot rolls up at $29.95.

I decided to embrace my status as a tourist, and wore the proffered bib. I'm very glad I did - the claws are ready-cracked, but I still managed to spray us both with liberal amounts of butter and crabby juices. A polite notice informed us that the recent cold weather (so aberrant that nobody in town seemed able to talk about anything else for the week we were there) meant that the meat from the claws may stick to the shell. It didn't, but this is still a messy eat. There's more here than you'll be able to eat; be careful to save some room for the excellent pie. The crab is the main event here, and it's downright fabulous - dense, sweet, rich and full of meat.

It's such a simple meal that I find I've little else to add. Head over if you have the chance to visit this gorgeous, sunny city, and don't bother exploring the rest of the menu. These crabs are something you won't find outside Florida, and they're a local delicacy so good that you'd be cheating yourself if you didn't snap up a few claws while you're there.

Nokka, Helsinki

I've just spent a few days in Helsinki, where the chill and dark at this time of year is easily remedied by a stiff glass of hot grog, a spell in the sauna and a few handsome servings of fish roe. Romantic lunches in the half-light at Kappeli, the cast iron and glass confection on Esplanadi; strolling through the covered market with a smoked lamprey in one hand (many thanks to the friendly Finn who suggested I look out for some; it's the end of the lamprey season); watching the herring gulls pick fish from the harbour and sneaking them bits of disappointing cake (also from the market). The sun does make an appearance at the end of November, but it's not a sun you'll recognise, staying low and watery in the sky. The light does funny things to your body clock - suddenly I understand why the Finns traditionally eat supper so early, especially in the winter.

So we booked a nice early table at Nokka (Kanavaranta 7, 00160 Helsinki), a restaurant that came heavily recommended by a friend. Behind the Russian Orthodox cathedral (and very close to Bellevue, which I visited last year), the restaurant is housed in an old warehouse looking out onto the sea, all orchids, vaulted red brick and giant wooden beams. The ten freezing minutes of huddling under umbrellas that we spent getting there were erased by a punchbowl full of wintertime grog and a great view into the open kitchen, where casually blond chefs swished around efficiently. More blondes, speaking perfect English, Finnish, Swedish, German and plenty of other languages besides, provide some of the best-trained service I've come across in this country. This room is slick, it's stylish, and the food matches up to it.

Nokka's menu is built around impeccable local sourcing. There's a page at the front of the menu about the various fishermen, farms, herb-growers, mushroom foragers and so forth that they use; the lamb, apparently, is from somewhere called Snappertuna, which has to be one of the best place names ever. We ordered the four-course Helsinki menu at €59 - a six-course version is available for €69 for the very hungry. Everything on the plate is seasonal - a real challenge in a Baltic November, but extremely well-conceived, with root vegetables and squashes where you might look for greener things in summer.

We opened with a little cup of wild mushroom soup as an amuse. Mushrooms and other foragables like berries have a very special place in Finnish food culture, and really do pop up all over the place; I found a clump of chanterelles growing on the pathway up to the Orthodox cathedral. As is traditional in Finnish soups, our little cups were heavily dosed with cream - on the edge of being rich, but very well-judged in a portion this size, where you're only eating a mouthful but want it to be a memorable one.

Fish, especially herring, is what Helsinki's all about. This little fillet (picture at the top of the page) had been marinaded in a tart preserving mixture, then gently grilled to lift its flavour even more. The process had given it a wonderful texture - soft and a little crisp around the edges. Tiny dollops of pureed potatoes (the Finns are justly proud of their potatoes, which have exceptional flavour thanks to those long summer days of sunshine) were topped with a little fish roe - a surprisingly good combination, rich and gorgeously balanced between the nutty, salty roe and smooth, creamy purée, which I'm going to try to do something with myself when the Jersey Royals come in next year. Add a little fresh beet salad, some sweet, gently pickled slices of raw carrot and red onion and a handful of dill and chervil, and you've got one of the best starters I've eaten all year. It's refreshing to find a plate full of garnish where the garnish is actually meaningful - nothing on this plate would have been as good on its own as the glorious whole was.

Alhopakka duck breast next, with a cardamom sauce and straw-smoked, puréed parsnips. The duck's leg, confited and shredded, was pressed into the timbale you can see at the side of the plate. Again, everything on the plate was part of a well-conceived whole - the smoked parsnip purée marrying so well with the cardamom, which paired so well with the fatty duck, which worked so well with the turtle beans and apricots tucked beneath it. And this was a big portion - as the meal progressed, we noticed that some who had ordered the six-course menu at other tables were struggling to finish everything.

Cheeses arrived, just a brie and a comte, served with no bread, but with some toasted nuts and seeds and fruit jellies. (No picture. I was getting funny looks from an adjacent table.) Not as exciting or unusual as the evening's other dishes, but a nice opportunity to get our ducks in a row, as it were, before attacking dessert.

So many places do a warm chocolate cake with a melty middle that it's become a bit of a cliche. A very jolly one, though, which is made considerably more interesting by the addition of pumpkin (more puree!), some chocolate rubble and a handsome dollop of very dark, malt ice cream. It's been a few days and I still can't work out whether or not I actually liked that pumpkin, a little bland in texture against the richness of all the other ingredients, but it certainly worked to tamp down the sweetness of the dish.

I've one issue with our meal, and it's not really Nokka's fault. Duty on alcohol is so high in Finland that ordering a bottle of wine with dinner is a considerable expense, and you're not going to find anything you'll enjoy drinking for under €60 a bottle - more than we paid for all four courses. This also has a lot to do with the current exchange rate, of course, which is particularly horrible if you're travelling from the UK or US. (The pound and the euro are nearly equivalent at the moment, which in a city which starts out as pricey as Helsinki means you are basically precluded from doing any shopping at all.) So I drank a single glass of cava with this meal, where it really deserved a nice fat bottle of Burgundy.

Try Helsinki in November. It's quiet, the room rates are fantastic (I finally scored a room at the Kamp, the city's only five-star hotel, which came in at about €150 less per night than I was quoted back in April), and there's a strangely intense romance to the dying light. And lord, the food's fun.

Blogger's lunch at Roast with Chapel Down Wines

If you were on Twitter yesterday at lunchtime...and for much of the afternoon...you'll have noticed that four food and wine bloggers and I were furiously live-tweeting a lunch from Roast in London's Borough Market, where wi-fi had been laid on to encourage us to look like total nerds as we ate. It's a restaurant perfectly placed to make the most of the fresh produce from the market - the emphasis here is on seasonality and wonderfully British things like haggis, pork belly and black pudding. Matching wines were provided, at a rate of two with each of the five courses along with a beer and a welcoming glass of fizz, by Chapel Down Winery. I'll recap my tweets and pictures from the meal below for those not on Twitter - as noted on the day, I'm afraid the quality of prose and photography drops as I work my way through the wine. And read down to the bottom, because the restaurant is offering blog readers a special menu with wines if you can make it to Roast on November 24, and Chapel Down have very generously provided a special offer on a case of wine for you as well.

Something of an experimental post, this - it's the first meal I've live-tweeted. Let me know what you think. (It's likely to remain a rare event: eating with a laptop on my knee is something I'd only do at a restaurant's request or suggestion, 'cos it made me feel geek-tacular.) You can read more of my daily ramblings on food if you follow me @liz_upton.

• Ensconced at Roast, gargling Chapel Down fizz. Expect quality of tweets to worsten as the lunch progresses - 2 pairings/course. 1:14pm, Nov 10
• See @wine_scribbler, @foodguardian, @thewinesleuth, @eatlikeagirl and @msgourmetchick for more on this lunch 1:16pm, Nov 10
• Smoked, dry-cured Loch Etive trout w crab cakes at Roast - trout outstanding. @wine_scribbler says shallots overpowering the wine - I like 'em! 1:33pm, Nov 10
  
  
• @wine_scribbler I'm actually preferring the Pinot Reserve - and I'm not sure why I'm tweeting this, given we're sitting next to each other. 1.36pm, Nov 10
• The smoked trout *was* a tricky thing to match wines with - next up, some haggis. 1:41pm, Nov 10
• A bottle of Chapel Down porter has just appeared in front of me - currently 5 glasses on table...getting confused. 1:42pm, Nov 10
• Bloody hell, this porter is good. Oak chips in barrel apparently - a winemaking tech and very splendidly spicy and tannic. 1:44pm, Nov 10
• We're all making Black Velvets with the Chapel Down Vint Res Brut and the CD Porter. Delicious and also slightly shaming. 1:53pm, Nov 10
• Haggis and oxtail on celeriac/spud mash. Heaven, especially w a Black Velvet!
  
  
• Just been given an obscenely good slice of grilled black pud to sample. Ramsey of Carluke in Lanarkshire - superb. 1:58pm, Nov 10
• Leaving the red undrunk. This is *highly* unusual for me. 1:59pm, Nov 10
• ...and we pause briefly while we collect ourselves. Jealously guarding my glass of Black Velvet from the v attentive wine waiters. 2:02pm, Nov 10
• @foodguardian is having trouble liveblogging because of his "Fisher Price phone". I have no sympathy. 2:04pm, Nov 10
• A wine made with the Bacchus grape (English) has just arrived. Rather excited. 2:09pm, Nov 10
• I'm getting tuberose and rubber off this wine - Bacchus not a grape I know well, but v intriguing. 2:10pm, Nov 10
• I lie - that was an 06 Pinot Blanc in an ident. glass. The Bacchus is actually weirdly sweet and unacidic - and v nice. 2:12pm, Nov 10
• BTW, I think we should open a book on precisely when we are all going to be too pissed to continue tweeting. I say by course 4. 2:13pm, Nov 10
• Roast's signature dish - pork belly w mash spuds and apple sauce. Hubba - look at that crackling. 2:23pm, Nov 10
  
• Pork belly outstanding - soft, tender meat, killer crackling. And there's almost as much butter in this mash as at Robuchon. 2:25pm, Nov 10
• Chatting to restaurant owner about these spuds, which I could happily *live* in. King Eds at the mo, but only because seasonal. 2:33pm, Nov 10 (On speaking to the chef later, I discovered that actually they're Maris Piper year round. Damn good, anyway.)
• Christ almighty. Apparently, portions usually x2 this size - that pic was just the *tasting* portion (of which I ate ½). 2:36pm, Nov 10
• Winemaker a bit unconfident about what's up next - UK dessert wines a bit difficult. This is pretty good, but more aperitif-y. 2:45pm, Nov 10
• Spiced clementine custard w anise biscuits - pud like Grandma used to make. Chapel D Nectar gorgeous, but questionable match! 2:51pm, Nov 10
  
  
• So I *really* like this Chapel Down Nectar, but not necessarily with food. The pannacotta underneath is fabboo. 2:54pm, Nov 10
• You might notice that at this point in proceedings the quality of writing and photography is descending *fast*. Sorry. :) 3:01pm, Nov 10
• And an 08 varietal English Pinot Noir. Chocolatey, dry, unoaked. Prolly my favourite of the Chapel Down wines so far. 3:07pm, Nov 10
• Warm chestnut & pear cake w hot choc sauce. Melting, so excuse me while I eat. 3:18pm, Nov 10
• Chef has emerged, with a light coating of sauce. 3:25pm, Nov 10
• Chef's belly tips - Stanley knife, rub salt & lemon, C230 for 30 mins, then down to 165 for 3 hours. 3:31pm, Nov 10
• ...And I'm shutting the computer down now. Feedback's very welcome - how do you lot feel about live-tweeted lunches?

Roast and Chapel Down are offering a special menu with wine pairings for blog readers on November 24. They asked for our help in selecting three of these courses to point you at, and we ended up going for the menu below (with pairings selected by the folks at Chapel Down).

• On arrival, a glass of Chapel Down Brut Rose
• Ramsey of Carluke haggis with celeriac and oxtail sauce, with a glass of Chapel Down Rondo Regent Pinot Noir NV
• Slow-roast Wicks Manor pork belly with mashed potatoes and Bramley apple sauce, served with a glass of Roast Bacchus Reserve 2007 (NB this will be the full sized portion, not the tasting portion from the pics above)
• Spiced clementine custard with anise biscuits, served with a glass of Chapel Down Nectar 2007
• Tea or coffee

With the wines, the menu will cost £44.50. If you want to book, call the restaurant on 0845 034 7300 and mention that you are booking for the Chapel Down Roast Bloggers’ Dinner on November 24.

Chapel Down are also offering readers a case of their Pinot Reserve 2004 for £99 for a case of six, including delivery to any UK mainland adddress. (A case usually retails at £150 plus delivery.) All you need to do is call the vineyard on 01580 763033, ask for Lizzie or Wendy and quote Blogger Offer.

Lo-Lo's Chicken and Waffles, Phoenix AZ

There are flavour combinations out there that sound barking mad until you try them. Witness the blissful comings-together of Cheddar cheese and Christmas cake; chocolate and hare; fig and prosciutto; strawberries and Balsamico. But how do you feel about fried chicken, breakfast waffles and maple syrup?

As it turned out, I discovered that I felt remarkably good about the idea, so took the opportunity to drive down to South Phoenix, where you'll find Lo-Lo's (Lo-Lo has just opened another branch in Scottsdale, but it's the original restaurant just south of Downtown Phoenix that we're concerned with here.) It's a little shack of a soul food restaurant in an area full of hand-painted warnings about vicious dogs, barbed wire and abandoned cars. Park in the yard behind the restaurant, hurry around to the entrance on the other side of the building, grab a seat at a counter or one of the tables, and get to grappling with the menu.

The main event here is the chicken and waffles, and the menu offers you about a dozen different chicken/waffle combinations, like Sheedah's Special (a breast, a wing, a waffle), Lil Amadt (a leg, a thigh, a waffle), and Lo-Lo's (three pieces of chicken, two waffles). If waffles aren't your thing, there are grits or fries; and you can sample collard greens, home fries, candied sweet potatoes and other things of the sort it's very hard to stop eating, all of which come as part of those combos or as side orders - try the cornbread with honey butter, crisp on the outside and light as a feather inside.

We ended up visiting twice, so we could explore a bit more of the menu. Drinks, served in massive Mason jars, are really good fun - sweet iced tea, silky with so much sugar syrup that your eyeballs hurt; home-made lemonade; Kool-Aid (the red sort only); Cherry Pepsi (which sent me into a Proustian reverie about the cans of cherry cola in my prep-school lunchbox). The fried chicken in Lo-Lo's very delicately spiced batter is delectable, pressure-fried so hot that the coating comes out dry and perfectly crisp, the chicken inside moist and succulent. The fat is scrupulously fresh - enormous refuse hoppers out back for the old fat demonstrated that it's changed very regularly, and you can taste this in what's on the plate. Waffles are light and puffy, with a dollop of whipped butter and a little glass ramekin of maple syrup, which you'll find yourself sloshing all over everything on your plate.

Every table sports a squeezy bottle of honey and some Trappey's hot peppers in vinegar - the pepper vinegar is meant for your collard greens, but I found myself drizzling the intensely fruity, spicy liquor all over the fried chicken and everything else I was eating. The kitchen also produces something called Chyna's honey hot sauce, which tasted a lot like a vinegar-based hot sauce like Frank's blended with honey - we dipped wings in it and pronounced it just splendid. The fried okra in cornmeal is, I think, bought in frozen, which is a shame; that said, once doctored with some pepper vinegar we found ourselves ordering it twice, so perhaps the frozen-ness isn't such a disaster.

The atmosphere at Lo-Lo's is fantastic - we got chatting to neighbouring tables, found ourselves engaged in deep conversation with the waiters and bemoaning the UK's useless absence of chillies in vinegar. Ultimately, I'm rather relieved there's nothing like Lo-Lo's round here; I'd be having serious trouble fitting into my trousers if there was. But if you find yourself in Phoenix, you'd be mad not to go. This is food with real heart - you can see why they call it soul food - and it's more delicious and less expensive than anything else we ate in the city.

Sen of Japan, Las Vegas

So you're in Las Vegas, and you're craving really, really good sushi and sashimi. You're almost certainly based somewhere on the Strip, and as a result you're faced with an embarrassment of choice. All of it really, really, really expensive.

There is a vast amount of Japanese food on the Strip, which there simply isn't space to cover here. Shibuya at MGM Grand and Okada at the Wynn are excellent, and come near the top of my personal list. Apparently Brandon Flowers from the Killers has been seen stuffing his face at Sushi Roku at the Forum Shops; and, of course, there's an outpost of Nobu at the Hard Rock - these restaurants are probably among the most fashionable of the sushi joints you'll find in town. Thing is, if you are set on eating the best the restaurant has to offer, this means ordering the omakase menu (the chef's choice of what is freshest and best on the day). And this usually means taking out a new mortgage. Shibuya's omakase menu is $115 per person, Okada's omakase isn't advertised - but the Wynn press office would like you to know that there's a very special omakase they'll do you for $1500 if you win big. Sushi Roku's omakase is a rather more reasonable $90, but it's a very Americanised, chain sushi experience, full of mayonnaise, fried bits and avocado - go to spot rock stars, not for the food. And Nobu has degenerated from its 1990s position as a real temple to food to being a place to see and be seen with some incidental raw fish. An omakase menu there will set you back "$100, $150 and up".

As we've noticed before, as soon as you get away from the neon and the crowds on the Strip, restaurant prices tumble. After all, the locals need somewhere to eat, and some of them are pretty exacting. So if you can gather yourself together for long enough to drive the six whole miles out to Sen of Japan, you'll find an omakase menu that will make your soul sing, for a $55 which seems absurd when held against some of the menus at the big casinos, where you'll get less for...more. There are no semi-naked, gyrating ladies, like you'll find at Tao at the Venetian or Social House at TI. There are no floating tables suspended beneath fabulous images projected onto waterfalls, like there are at Okada. I like it all the more for that.

Hiro Nakano, the chef/owner at Sen of Japan (8480 W Desert Inn Road #F1, Las Vegas 89117, tel. (702) 871-7781) used to be head chef at Nobu (pre-downward-slippage, judging by what we were served here). He prepares the hot food, while a chef from the sadly defunct Shintaro at Bellagio is poised behind the sushi bar for the cold bits. Service was terrific, chatty and friendly; our server, John, seemed genuinely amazed that two Brits on holiday would travel that six whole miles for good food. And the food...hoo boy.

Sen's omakase changes daily (as all omakase menus should, and few seem to), so what we had will be representative but not necessarily what you'll find when you visit.

We opened with yellowtail sashimi (above), laid on a roll of shaved daikon, garnished with slivers of jalapeño, crisp garlic shavings, coriander and soy. Clean, beautifully balanced, and as fresh as you like. Next out was a generous bowl of sashimi and mizuna salad, flavoured, alongside the expected soy, with garlic olive oil and some very surprising capers. This is (as you'll also have gathered from the coriander and jalapeños with the yellowtail) not Japanese food in its purest form, but I am not an authentiseeker in these matters; if you're going to insist on limiting your set of ingredients to those found in Japan, you'll be missing out on some really interesting and apposite flavour combinations - and Chef Nakano is extraordinarily good at putting these together.

On to the hot courses. First out, an oddly familiar black cod (actually a kind of bass) in miso, served with a pickled ginger shoot on a plate swirled with wasabi-tinted Japanese mayonnaise and crushed pink peppercorns. This is, of course, the same black cod that was made famous by Nobu, Nakano's last head-chefly posting, presented rather differently. Wherever I've eaten a similar dish (and this does crop up at an awful lot of Japanese restaurants) I've loved it - there's a recipe on Gastronomy Domine for a similar, grilled arrangement you can make with some salmon, black cod being hard to find in most fishmongers. Mine's nothing like as pretty as this (it's a recipe I was given by a Japanese friend about a decade ago, and is more along the lines of something you'd find in a Japanese home), but it tastes great. For prettiness, though, the Sen of Japan version takes the biscuit - and we cleaned those long plates.

Filet mignon with asparagus and a soy-mustard sauce. Probably my least favourite dish of the evening; tasty, juicy, nicely hung, perfectly medium-rare - but it just wasn't as interesting as everything else we were served. Still; this is a very steak-oriented part of the world, and everywhere else we've had menus of this sort in Vegas, a steak has popped up somewhere. I'm told that if you pay for the more expensive omakase menu at Sen, you'll find this steak transmogrified into a piece of Kobe beef, bits of foie gras decorating other courses, and things like lobster and caviar popping up here and there. We elected to avoid the pricier ingredients so we could concentrate on the fish, but you might decide it's worth pushing the foie boat out.

Next up: five pieces of nigiri, with two maki rolls. You're looking (bottom to top) at tuna (maguro), fluke (a generic name for flatfish - hirame), salmon (sake), black snapper (kuro dai) and a cooked prawn (shrimp if you're American, ebi if you're Japanese). The rolls, part-visible at the top, were more maguro. All good, all fresh, all nicely seasoned, but not, again, terribly unusual; I suspect that if we'd managed to score seats at the sushi bar and had been able to talk to the sushi chef, things might have turned out a little more exciting. What was spectacular was the accompanying miso soup, which arrived with juicy, fresh littleneck clams straight from California, still in their shells (and, judging by the flavour, alive until moments ago), bobbing around in the hot broth, which took on a breath of flavour from the juices of the shellfish. Beautiful.

The meal was finished off with a hot chocolate souffle with a ball of green tea ice cream. Everywhere does a hot chocolate souffle; this was a good one. The ice cream is terrific - I'm not normally a dessert person, but this was very jolly.

There's absolutely no reason to stick to the Strip for your Vegas dining. You can even go celebrity-spotting at Sen; apparently Andre Agassi is a regular, as is the city's ex-mob-lawyer mayor, Oscar Goodman. Admittedly, this is not the handsomest dining room in town, but then again, it's not meant to be; this is just an excellent neighbourhood sushi-ya which happens to serve up food that will compete with anything you can find on the strip at much, much more sensible prices. Head out there next time you're in town, and tell them I sent you.

Raku, Spring Mountain Road, Las Vegas

I spend more time in Las Vegas than is strictly healthy, especially for someone who doesn't find gambling particularly diverting. (I don't think I've ever spent more on gambling there than $10 in a week; I am a disaster for casino marketing.) So what's up with the yearly visit, which this year seems to have turned into two yearly visits? Easy - the restaurants. (And the tigers, the neon and the shows, but mostly it's the restaurants.)

Something curious happened to the city in the early 90s, when big-name, starry chefs from all over the world started to move into the larger hotels. The Strip casinos now house restaurants headed up by people like Joel Robuchon, Alain Ducasse, Michael Mina, Charlie Trotter, Thomas Keller and Guy Savoy - heaven for people who vacation for food. If you're like me, though, you'll find yourself wondering where the chefs themselves eat.

It turns out that most of them seem to head for Raku.

Raku (see the website for directions, a menu and booking) is a tiny aburiya - a sort of Japanese bar serving food designed to encourage you to get you drinking. It's open until 3am, so restaurant workers can pile in after service, and it dishes up extraordinarily good food, mostly as small plates. If there's one thing I've learned in years of American eating, it's not to judge a restaurant by its location. You'll find Raku in an unprepossessing strip mall well away from the tourist focus of the city, so it's currently not somewhere you'll read about in guidebooks - I was told about it by a chef who used to work in the city. You'll still need to book, especially as the evening wears on; locals pack the place out, and it's very small, with about 30 covers. And there's a very good chance that if you arrive good and late, you'll spot some of the big-name chefs who have filled a cabinet near the bathroom with signed cookbooks and adulatory little notes.

This is one of those very enjoyable menus that doesn't have any consideration for Western notions of squeamishness. You'll find items like grilled beef intestine; raw bonito guts; uncooked tongue, prepared sashimi-style; beef tendon; grilled pig's ear - if, however, you're dining with a friend who has not yet discovered the wonderfulness of offal, there are plenty of less intimidating options too, especially in the beef and chicken direction. Dishes start at $1.50 for some of the robata (charcoal-grilled) items, and there's no set structure to the meal, plates arriving as they come ready. We went for a couple of appetiser-sized dishes, some robata bits and pieces and some of the daily specials. It's hard to impose structure on this sort of meal, so I'll discuss each dish in the order they arrived in.

Those salted, raw bonito guts, which I'd seen on the online menu before visiting and had been making thrilled noises about at the long-suffering Dr W for two weeks before our reservation, worked as a kind of solid seasoning sauce for this sashimi salad (the menu calls this "Seafood with bonito guts pickled in salt", and it comes in at a ludicrously low $6), the first dish to arrive. Glorious stuff; the bonito guts taste somewhat like a very salty, extraordinarily umami duck liver might - no fishiness, just an intense, meaty savouriness. The flavour insinuated its way through the whole dish, lifting the very fresh salmon, tuna and mackerel pieces out of mere sashimi territory into something quite special. This dish is, according to our waitress, also prepared with tongues of uni (sea urchin) in season - I'd love to try the bonito guts against the sea-sweetness of uni, and found myself planning our next visit once I was about two bites in.

Dr W will do almost anything for a good Caesar salad. Fortunately for him, there's a fusion-y version on Raku's menu - a dried tatami sardine salad ($6.50), whose dressing is like a de-anchovied Caesar dressing with slivers of crisp, savoury mats of what look like straw-coloured noodles - actually dried, shredded sardines studded with cracked black pepper. And, oddity of oddities in a Japanese restaurant, a hearty sprinkling of Parmesan cheese.

All this remarkable stuff - the bonito guts, the sardine crisps, and the dashi and tofu we're about to discuss - is made from scratch in the little kitchen. Especially when you're dealing with a product like tofu, there's a chasm of difference between what you might have come across in shops and restaurants that bulk-buy, rather than preparing these things themselves, and somewhere like Raku (the only other tofu I've had that's this good outside the Far East has been at Tanuki, another aburiya in Portland OR that prepares its own).

We ordered the house special, which is at the top of the specials board every night. Agedashi tofu - tofu covered in a little light batter, served in a bowl of dashi (a kind of bouillon or stock made from dried bonito and kelp) is served in most Japanese restaurants, but I swear it's never tasted this good before. The disc of tofu was almost floral in its freshness, and the dashi (considered a true assessment of any Japanese chef's skill) was outstanding - a totally different creature from many I've tried. Alongside the traditional accompaniment of spring onions, the tofu was decorated with a few pearls of salmon roe, shredded nori, some tiny mushrooms and a dab of chilli sauce, all of which acted as seasoning rather than garnish - salt, iodine-richness, earthiness and heat.

I've no idea what that tofu cost - we asked the prices of what was on the specials board and didn't get any answers. (Only dodgy bit of service of the evening, and something that doesn't seem to be isolated; we got talking to a customer in another Japanese restaurant later in the week who felt he'd spent far more at Raku than he meant to, simply because of that number-free specials board and some flirtation with o-toro and foie gras.) Another special at a mystery price - six tiny crabs, each about the size of a ping-pong ball. They arrived having emerged moments ago a wok of oil so hot that there was no greasiness to them at all, to be popped into the mouth whole, and crunched. I was expecting puncture wounds to the inside of my cheeks, but they gave to the teeth like crisp wafers, with a burst of fresh crab creaminess in the centre. I could have eaten twenty.

The robata-grilled dishes arrived in a flurry. American Wagyu skirt steak, marinaded in a sticky soy mixture and served with garlic chips ($6.00). Fat Kurobuta pork cheeks (a ridiculous $2.50, pictured below), threaded on a skewer, caramelised and smoky from their marinade and the charcoal grill. Shishito peppers ($2), delicate, sweet and mildly spiced. And a remarkable thing the menu calls "potato with corn" ($3). Discs of sweetcorn, the hard hull in the centre somehow magically removed and replaced with a smooth mashed potato, the whole then brushed with a little soy-based magic and grilled until they became tender and smoky.

This is a long post for food that's not terribly complicated: the restaurant deserves it. When something as seemingly simple as the operation of a charcoal grill is done with such aplomb that the results surprise you as much as they did here, you know you're onto something pretty special. It pays to explore any city's less central dining; we found two off-strip gems in Vegas on this trip (more about the other later on) to go with Lotus of Siam, another Vegas Asian restaurant in a strip mall. I've not even talked about the superbly welcoming atmosphere at Raku, the handsome room or the generally excellent service - the food's good enough to eclipse all that. If you're in the city, drive out there or take a cab, and explore the more curious-sounding corners of the menu. You'll find yourself rewarded a million times over for the effort.

Celebrity Equinox, Murano restaurant

Cruise ships are (floating) terra incognita to me. The closest I'd managed before being offered last weekend's very lavish freebie was a number of trips on cross-channel ferries, where the food is always so bad you're almost obliged to pack a picnic; and my friends' houseboat in Cambridge where we mostly eat packets of biscuits and drink tea.

I'd imagined cruise ships to be petrol-smelling, slippery-decked, claustrophobic white things, lurching gracelessly between icebergs and tugboats, and occasionally spearing clumsy whales on their prows. "We'll have bunks," grumbled Dr W, "and we'll be in steerage, like Leo Di Caprio. There won't be any windows."

Happily, Celebrity Cruises have positioned themselves firmly at the luxury end of the market, so the cabin - sorry, state room - that we'd been apportioned turned out to have king-sized bed with a supremely comfortable pillow-top mattress; thick linen sheets; not only windows, but a private balcony for seagull-spotting; and a shower with those fantastic boob-washing jets in the wall.

The public areas feel like an attempt at a theme park crossed with a Vegas casino and Terminal 5 at Heathrow. I say this as someone who really, really gets a kick out of Terminal 5, which is sick and wrong - you have to admit, though, that the place does gave a certain delicious gleam to it. On Celebrity Equinox, two glistening atriums stretch the whole height of the ship to relieve the sense of low ceilings you can't really escape in this situation, one with a live orange tree in a big glass pot suspended halfway down the 14-storey space. Up top, the decks are tiled with swimming pools, hot tubs, lawns, a glass-blowing studio (I'm still scratching my head about this one) and a jogging track. Inside, it's all state rooms, cafes, bars, restaurants, a spa, a solarium, an enormous theatre, clubs, gyms and an ultraloungy sort of observation suite, all circular couches and swanky LED lighting. Everywhere you turn, somebody dressed in white is washing or polishing something.

Cruises of the sort Celebrity runs are generally all-inclusive, but for the four premium restaurants, where you'll pay an extra $35. (It's an American company, and the currency on board is the US dollar.) I'd been invited (with Douglas, Andrew and Julia) to lunch with Chef Jaques Van Staden. We were served a six-course tasting menu with wine pairings in Murano, the ship's top French restaurant, all dark woods and white linens. Here's JVS (the chap in focus), beaming at something fatuous I (on the right) have just said.

There are constraints on restaurants at sea that I hadn't even considered before talking to him about the restaurant's operations. The ship has capacity for 2850 guests, has to feed all these people without recourse to daily markets, and on occasion will go several days without being able to restock. This is an enormous number of people to be feeding - in one year, the company will spend $4.5m on bacon alone, so food sourcing is all centralised. Produce is loaded in shipping containers from three ports around the world, and some clever work on the menus means that the culinary team (of 1253 staff on the ship, more than half work in food and beverage) are able to assemble some surprisingly classy meals which in no way resemble ship's biscuit. JVS is aiming very, very high in his ambitions for this restaurant, and I'm not quite sure it's there yet; there were a few slips in what we ate for lunch. But this is a restaurant that's barely been open for ten days, and as such, there were bound to be a few rough edges that needed smoothing over.

If there's one thing they've licked at Murano, it's the presentation. Everything was terribly, terribly pretty on the plate; the plates themselves were selected by JVS to match the coppery, woody decor ("No rims. I don't like a plate with a rim.") Behold a perfectly pretty amuse - jumbo shrimp in a saffron risotto. Really, really salty, but packed with saffron.

There's a necessary reliance here on preserved ingredients, so a wild mushroom cappuccino which arrived shortly after I'd spent five minutes banging on about my hatred of foams - oops - used a lot of dried mushrooms and was accompanied by a porcini ice-cream (melting into a small pool by the time it got to my plate, but darned tasty), a clever way to extend the flavour life of the fresh mushroom. The 07 Puligny Montrachet by Louis Jadot with this course was golden and honeyed, a good match with this and, apparently, with the lobster bisque ("Very dense, very flavourful," said Andrew from Spittoon when I asked him how it was - I have to be careful around lobsters because of the whole anaphylaxis thing, but made up for it by stealing everybody else's foie gras later in the meal).

Spinach salad was topped off with a disc of pork rillettes (more clever use of preserves), a chicken's egg ("I think we should use quail here," said the chef, frowning at my plate - I'm with him on this - a chicken's yolk is just too much with something as fatsome as rillettes) and a sliver of black truffle, all scattered with dehydrated shallots and shards of crispy pancetta. Before tasting the dish, I asked JVS how they cope with something as perishable as a truffle at sea. He responded with the full force of his giant grin. "We preserve them in port." Surprisingly successful, and the truffle vinaigrette was a well-balanced foil to the heavy egg and rillettes. There were a few competition winners from Delicious magazine at the table too, and it was a first taste of truffles for one of them - always a lovely thing to witness, especially when the reaction is so unabashedly positive.

A twice-cooked goat's cheese soufflé for half of us - a seared slice of foie gras and duck rillettes, spiced with star anise and cinnamon for the others. (I did my best to keep from gazing bitterly at their plates, failed and then launched into stealing as much as I could.) The soufflé was a good one - sharp with the goat's cheese, bathed in a sea of Parmesan-scented Béchamel - and enormous, such that I ended up eating about half. These are very big portions for a tasting menu. I suspect a lot of this is to do with the demographic that makes up Celebrity's customers - usually older Americans, from the land where the giant portion is king. That demographic suits me just fine, though - it just means more room in the clubs, the pool and the hot tubs for the food blogging contingent on board while everybody else dozes in the sun, as Andrew has helpfully recorded for posterity.

The service is super-attentive; so much so that it all feels a bit unsophisticated, as when the gargantuan pepper grinder is brought out and proffered at the start of every single course. It's hard to mind - they're trying so hard to impress, and everybody's so charming, that I actually missed that grinder when it came to the cheese course. A pretty little apple sorbet spiked with Calvados came out as a palate cleanser - in his review of a similar meal that evening, Jay Rayner called this course old-fashioned, and indeed it was - but it was sweet, it was charming, and it was a nice break from all that dense eating. (I have a soft spot for the concept of a trou Normand, the little hole of space in a full stomach that a gulp of Calvados is meant to give you - my mother used to ensure my little brother and I both got a healthy slurp of hers at large meals when we went on our regular gastronomic tours of France, starting me off on a lifetime of dipsomania.)

Venison for half the table, loup de mer for the other half. A dense Brunello here to drink - not what I'd have chosen with this fish, but it was a pretty good match with the garnish it was sitting on.

Another hurdle for the cruise ship kitchen to jump is refrigeration - meats and fish need to be frozen. JVS has acquired a machine which defrosts flash-frozen meat very slowly, over a four-day period, for an absolute minimum of cellular damage. The meat is never allowed to stay frozen for more than five days. I pinched a bite from Douglas's plate (hard work with a fish knife, so I made up for it by also stealing most of his celeriac puree - sorry Douglas) - it's a surprisingly successful process, and I couldn't detect any hint that the pink, juicy venison loin had been frozen. Cries of surprise went up around the table from anyone who had ever frozen a steak. Unfortunately, a similar process wouldn't work for fish, and mine came out of the fryer a bit dry and rubbery. Again, though, the presentation was so fine I almost didn't care - the fish was trapped in a fine net of potato and served on an incredibly dense and beautiful plate of Provençal preserves - capers, artichokes, olives and so on, bound with raw tomatoes and baba ganoush. (There's another picture of this very pretty course with Monday's post, where you can also see some more photos of the ship itself.) Fierce flavours, these - my bread roll came in handy to damp down some of what was going on on the plate.

A cheese course next with some '96 vintage Graham's port. There was nothing unusual about any of these cheeses, but they were all kept well and chosen well (Epoisses, Livarot, Roquefort, Comte and a nice crottin of Chevre). I notice Jay Rayner was displeased with the texture of his Epoisses that evening - we weren't given any at lunchtime, although we did see the cheese sitting on the chariot, so I suspect the specialist cheese sommelier (who was great value) secretly agreed with him. The little pot contains a scoop of silky Roquefort sorbet. All the other cheeses, served at a good room temperature with fruits and nuts, were beautiful examples - I am thankful there wasn't more, because dessert was simply enormous.

Here it is: Les VI Etoiles du Murano. I think this is meant to serve two, but I ended up with one to myself (which I ended up giving most of to Andrew, the very charming competition winner on my left, while I concentrated on the wine). From right (closest) to left, you're looking at a rose cream with candyfloss (I annexed that one for myself); a black chocolate and coffee mousse; a white chocolate crème with raspberry coulis (the table's favourite); strawberries poached in Chambertin; an apple and walnut crumble and a milk and caramel gelato with popcorn. Best of all, though, was what we were given to drink with this course (prompted, I suspect, by the arrival of Celebrity's president, Dan Hanrahan) - a Tokaji from 2003, a year you will probably remember as uncomfortably sweltering. It was just great for Tokaji, such that I can barely read my handwriting in the notes I took over pudding.

JVS oversees the menus at all the onboard restaurants - 3786 different dishes are available across the whole ship, and around 12,000 meals and nibbles are served daily. It's a hell of an operation, and it's clearly wise of the company to run day-cruises like ours to help the staff learn to cope - this was only day ten of operations, and our evening meal at the much less swanky main dining room was a bit of a let-down after lunchtime's service. Food in the gargantuan Silhouette dining room was glacially slow in arriving, so our fellow diners had to skip a course to make it to the theatre in time for the show, and the whole table's main course plates appeared to have missed a crucial pass through a microwave, arriving fridge-cold. Thank God I'd ordered gazpacho for my starter. (I suspect that this is the sort of problem that won't occur once the ship is up and running properly.) Wines in the complimentary restaurants aren't good (to be honest, the white was so awful I ended up drinking Newcastle Brown Ale instead, to the horror of the ladies I was sharing a table with). It's clear that a cruising foodie needs to be dedicating himself to find that extra $35 a night to eat in one of the five speciality restaurants - and then to spending the rest of the day on the jogging track to burn off all that Béchamel.

Le Gavroche, Upper Brook St, London

A confession - I have a (probably pathological) dislike of writing about my absolute favourite restaurants here. There aren't that many which fall into that category; a couple in London, a couple in the US, a couple - OK, more than a couple - in France; but there's an unpleasantly selfish part of me which really, really doesn't want to share. It's irrational, and lately I've pledged to get the hell over this particular issue, which is good news for you, because you are finally getting to read about places I keep returning to, like L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon and Le Gavroche (the pic is pinched from Wikimedia Commons - I hate bringing a camera to places like this). You'll also get to read about several of my favourites, so far jealously unshared, in October, when Food Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 Extraordinary Places to Eat Around the Globe is released - it's a National Geographic publication, and 20 of those extraordinary places were written about by me. More on that when the book finally comes out.

So. Gavroche. You know the chap - grubby urchin in Les Miserables. And you're probably aware of the food royalty that own and still run the restaurant, founded in 1967 by Michel and Albert Roux. The kitchen is now run by Michel Roux Jr (son of Albert), and both older chefs still take an active interest in the place; good news for chefspotters. (I'm an avid one, and I was as pleased to see Albert Roux walk past my table on Monday as I would have been to see Brad Pitt, who is doubtless much less deft with artichokes.)

As usual, I rolled up for a weekday lunch, part of what I consider the freelancer's dividend. I've mentioned it before, but if you're in a position to do this, it bears repeating: many of London's best restaurants offer surprisingly well-priced lunch menus in the week. The weekday set lunch menu here is, at first glance, pricier than elsewhere, at £48 a head - but this sum includes half a bottle of wine (you're given a choice of four, which are always beautifully selected - ours was a 2004 St-Emilion Grand Cru from Chateau Vieux Sarpe, carefully decanted at the table); half a bottle of Evian; and coffee and petits fours, which most other places will have you pay for separately at lunchtime. The food itself is as good as you'll find in the UK, and generous amuses bouches and petits fours (who knew that physalis, caramel and coconut was such a good combination?) round things out so well that you'll leave thrilled at the value of what you've eaten.

The amuses are always good - to be honest, they're often extraordinary. Artichoke Lucullus, cut into elegant crescents and stuffed with summer truffles, foie gras and chicken mousse; sea bass carpaccio; little toasts with a blue cheese mousse so beautifully balanced I could have eaten a dozen more for a main course.

Once you launch onto the menu proper, you'll find there's some clever work going on balancing luxe ingredients like truffles and foie gras with delicious things which cost the kitchen far less - a perfectly poached egg balanced on a Russian salad of potatoes, peas, carrots and celeriac sounds good but dull until you realise there are a couple of gargantuan slice of summer truffle perching on top, and a creamy truffle emulsion binding the vegetables together. Girolles are paired with a slow-cooked lamb's tongue, cut into meltingly tender slices. It's one of those menus where you're hard-pressed to make a decision, everything sounding so perfectly edible - I should also point out that it's one of those menus that's written entirely in French. I used to live in Paris, and I'm the sort of anal-retentive who takes great pleasure in memorising the French for things like guinea fowl and fairy-ring mushroom. Even so, I came unstuck and had (horror!) to ask for help from the waiting staff. My friend and I were pretty sure Maigre was a sort of fish - but what sort? And what was a Sauce Antiboise? (It's a white fish related to the sea bass, it turns out; and Antiboise simply means 'from Antibes', which I should bloody well have known. It's a raw tomato concasse with basil and olives...and probably much more, but my dining companion was very sensibly preventing me from eating everything on her plate under the pretext of making notes.)

The staff (to a man/woman, French) are supremely helpful and will offer all the help you need with translation - you are clearly not expected to know what a maigre is, which makes me question the usefulness of the monoglot menu. Two of them are also supremely disconcerting. They're identical twins, with matching extravagant hair dye, matching statement glasses, and matching mis-matched earrings. Cue a nanosecond of worry that an hallucinogen has been slipped into your Salade Russe.

This is the sort of restaurant where I'm happy to order veal liver. There's a certain mental accounting you need to do when you next encounter it on a menu. Consider for a moment how much veal you see in British restaurants. There's very, very little; even saltimbocca is usually made with pork these days. Now consider how much veal liver you see on menus (a surprising amount), and how many livers the average calf has. (That's one, for those without a Biology GCSE.) There are simply not enough veal calves being eaten in the UK to provide the number of livers you'll see on menus. The inevitable upshot is that much of the stuff you've ordered under the guise of veal liver has actually been beef liver - with the coarser texture, strong odour and flavour that that implies - so I never, ever order veal liver unless I'm somewhere I'm absolutely confident won't palm me off with a superannuated gland. The liver at Le Gavroche is the real thing, so fresh it gives to the teeth like the flesh of a ripe plum, and its delicate flavour is seasoned sensitively with a very gentle green peppercorn sauce and a shallot confit. Ask for it to be served pink - simply beautiful stuff.

The cheeseboard is simply enormous, stacked high with French bliss, but we had our heads turned by the poached peach with champagne and raspberry mousse. A whole, peeled white peach, stone still in, had been poached to perfect silky softness in champagne, like a solid Bellini, and stood up in a swirl of raspberry mousse, just tart enough to offer a contrast. Regular readers will know that I don't have much of a sweet tooth, but even I would have turned down a fine bacon sandwich if offered this instead. (This doesn't sound like much of a compliment. Believe me, it is. I will do almost anything for a fine bacon sandwich - husband, take note.)

Of course, not everything here is perfect, or I would have set up a tent under one of the tables by now. Gavroche, the eponymous urchin, appears thumb-sized and in glorious 3D at the bottom of the shaft of all the cutlery, and frankly, he's hideous. Like the decor - this restaurant perfectly apes a 1980s gentleman's club, down to the carpeting, the green leather banquettes and the awful art on the walls. When I was a kid in the 80s, we had a very wealthy hotel-owning, huntin', shootin' neighbour, who affected plus-fours and displayed photos of himself with strings of recently murdered trout on his walls. He'd be right at home here with the ugly beaten-metal sculptures of edible birds, which the restaurant sells for thousands of pounds to...someone. The room, and its clientele, is overwhelmingly masculine - we were the only all-female table in the place. But I don't care - they welcomed me with a crescent of artichoke full of foie gras, truffles and chicken mousse, so they can be as ugly and male as Rasputin for all I care.

L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon, London W1

In London for a day of Ladies' Nice Things, my Mum and I had decided to take advantage of L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon's (020 7010 8600) set lunch menu (£25 for three courses - cooking at this level is hard enough to find anywhere in the capital, let alone at this sort of price). There is little as good for the appetite as perching on the world's plushiest bar stools and looking over the open finishing kitchen as a synchronised team of young French chefs waltz around each other in pressed, white formation, whipping potatoes, peeling baby artichokes, and slicing truffles.

We'll start this one back-to-front, at the point where the bill arrived. We noticed the two glasses of champagne we'd opened the meal with (for what is worth celebrating more than a nice day out with your Mum?) had been omitted from the receipt, and called the server over to ask him to add them on. He didn't miss a beat, but said 'Not at all; if the champagne has not appeared on the bill, please accept it with our compliments'.

Good dining's not all about what's on your plate. Service, noise level, comfort and the beauty of the room (and this room is like a red and black-lacquered Japanese box with a living wall of leaves) all have their part to play, and here all those elements slot neatly together to result in a real joy of a restaurant. Robuchon, who was named Chef of the Century back in the 1980s by Gault Millau, has 25 Michelin stars divided between his neat squadron of a dozen restaurants in cities all over the world. I've eaten in the Las Vegas Atelier and the London one, and quality, style and service are absolutely consistent between the two restaurants.

Meals at l'Atelier are presented either as small plates which the diner can select tapas-style from the menu; as larger plates to be enjoyed as a starter, main course and dessert; or as a dégustation set (£110) of the smaller plates chosen by the chef. Some of these dishes have become famous in their own right and are always found on the tasting menu: the quail stuffed with foie gras; the mashed potato, which is 50% butter and whipped into a cloud of silk. Robuchon's cooking is of the voluptuously rich school that he was instrumental in founding after France's flirtation with nouvelle cuisine; your meal here will be smooth with butter and oils and dense with meticulous, slow-cooked flavours.

That lunch menu is a magnificent introduction to Robuchon's cooking; at any rate, I'm not sure I could cope with the richness of the dégustation menu at lunchtime. There are two choices for each of the three courses, and the menu changes with the day's market. Salmon rillettes were packed with dill and fresh horseradish (which is, incidentally, making an appearance on market stalls in Cambridge at the moment - local readers should head out and grab a root for a horseradish sauce recipe I'm planning for next week) - hot-smoked salmon whipped into crème fraîche, studded with fat jewels of cold-smoked salmon, accompanied by a sharp salad made from paper-thin slivers of fennel. Soups are always fresh and frequently thick with cream - my broccoli soup had a crouton floating on top, slathered with tapenade and a spoonful of sweet onion confit which reminded me of the French onion soup (so good I'm never ordering it anywhere else again) I had there back in March.

Razor clams are something you seldom see in British restaurants, and I always order them when I see them. They're a beautiful shellfish, large, sweet and tender to the tooth. These were from Colchester, superbly fresh; and had been removed from the shell, then gratinated with a leek fondue, butter-soft, and Parmigiano. Not a trace of the fine, sandy grit that almost invariably clouds razor clam dishes - and I was thankful for an epi of bread from the basket which staunched some of the butteriness. Patte noir chicken was roasted (I suspect the involvement of a rotisserie grill) to a lovely, butter-aided succulence with a mahogany-crisp skin. We'd asked for a bowl of mashed potato in addition to the lunch menu - even if it's not on the menu, they'll find some for you - and agreed we could happily live on the stuff, and possibly in it too.

Wine pairings are suggested for each dish, and we asked for a glass each - a 2007 Montlouis to go with my clams, and a Stonier Pinot Noir from Australia with the chicken. Both beautifully selected, the Montlouis reflecting the butter-sweetness of the clams, and the Pinot Noir really European in character - plenty of fruit, but closer to a Burgundy in style; lovely stuff. I got back from the ladies' (a dim spot in the excellent design - it's all very elegant, but the lights in there make you look like the living dead) to find my Mum happily launched on a second glass, which she claimed would help her pudding down.

A set of five slim slices from different tarts is a dessert that usually appears on the £25 menu. I'm not a huge fan of the signature dessert, a Chocolate Sensation (you are likely to be far fonder of chocolate than I am - I suspect it's a genetic abnormality, given that Mum's really not into it either). The Chocolate Sensation was the only dessert on offer with the lunch menu, but I asked whether they had the tarts, and five minutes later two helpings arrived, beautifully plated and for no extra charge. And that's absolutely typical of the service at l'Atelier. It's both graceful and gracious, and they will bend over backwards to help you - witness the business with the champagne. The tart selection has changed every time I've visited, but if you are lucky you might encounter the cinnamon custard on filo pastry or the puckeringly sharp lemon tart. Keeping seasonal produce in mind, there was a strawberry shortcake topped with three perfect fresh strawberries and a sort of raspberry clafoutis arrangement - and even chocolate agnostics like us decided the chocolate, caramel and hazelnut concoction, smooth and dense, was about as good as such things get.

Coffee here is great, but I'd suggest you walk the 100 yards to the Monmouth St Coffee House for my favourite cup of coffee in London if you can get off the barstool. (I am 5'2". I find such things challenging.) Mum was thrilled with lunch - I believe she's taking my Dad back to l'Atelier next week for a date.

Asia – The Pan-Asian Dining Room, Regent St, Cambridge

Regular readers will know that I have always had a mild distrust of those restaurants which purport to specialise in the foods of more than one culture. You know what I mean - those places offering up dim sum alongside sushi, or Thai food with Japanese soba. So I went to Asia, up at the Catholic church end of Regent Street in Cambridge, with a bit of trepidation. (Full disclosure here - I'd been invited by the owners and got a free meal.)

Asia (the restaurant, not the continent) is smart enough not to try to do Japanese food, but explores Chinese, Thai and Indian foods in a very similar way to that you'll find in Malaysian cuisine, with food from all three cultures served up alongside each other - and thankfully, they do it all very well indeed. This is actually a combination of cuisines that makes really good sense. It can be a bit disconcerting ordering Indian and Chinese side dishes to go with a Thai main course, but once you get into the swing of things, the flavours - aromatic lime leaves here, Goan curry spicing there, oyster sauce and fermented beans over there - gel surprisingly well. Ask the very helpful waiters if you're trying to work out some good flavour combinations; they know the menu backwards and are very ready to help. Ingredients are fresh and, where possible (obviously, you're going to run into trouble sourcing mangoes in East Anglia), local.

It's a big space, and just avoids that hard-surface thing where restaurant interiors become loud and boomy. It's all handsome, contemporary dark wood and marble juxtaposed with Indian and South East Asian artifacts - a Thai screen, an Indian limestone frieze - and the odd bit of upholstery. It's spotlessly clean, it's a very pretty room to eat in, and the welcome and service, which was warm, friendly and helpful, didn't seem to be at all different from what the guests around us were getting. So far, so splendid - and did you know that Kingfisher, the Indian restaurant lager people, are also doing a very good fizzy mineral water now?

We opened with my favourite Thai salad, Som Tum, all green papaya, sour lime, savoury fish sauce and dried shrimp, with two fat prawns. Dr W went for scallops, and the restaurant must be proud of these, because they're stupendous and very unusual - sweet Scottish scallops, seared to a barely-cooked wobble with a coriander crust, served with salted yoghurt and, right out of left-field, olive purée. (They say the purée is Peruvian. No, I have no idea either, but it was good, and perfectly salty against the sweet flesh of the scallops.)

Mains are served individually, not family-style. This is not the Upton way of doing things, especially when everything on the table is so interesting, and we wanted to put the dishes in the middle so we could share. Waiters swished around elegantly as soon as I asked, conjuring hot, clean plates out of nowhere. And just as well too, because Dr W's Goan halibut curry in a lovely rough tomato and tamarind sauce was a firm, moist beast, so there was no way I wasn't going to eat half of it. We'd also gone for a dish of Kai Krob, a Thai chicken in pieces, cooked in a light, floury coating that was halfway between chewy and crispy - fabulous - with a good hit of sweetness and a scattering of intensely aromatic kaffir lime leaves.

Presentation's great here, such that we found ourselves remarking that one of the side-dishes (shitake and oyster mushrooms with home-made garlic chilli sauce and yellow beans) was much less pretty than the other things on the table, particularly the Bombay potatoes, all scattered with crispy vermicelli and punctuated with bright green coriander. But beauty's only potato-skin deep, and the Bombay potatoes tasted pretty ordinary, while those mushrooms (must have been the home-made sauce) had us wiping the empty bowl with a naan. A naan, I will have you know, that was studded with dates - if you get that Goan halibut curry, the date naan is a brilliant foil to it.

A short pause for hot hand towels soaked in eau de cologne. Rumpole of the Bailey once bit into one in a dark Chinese restaurant, mistaking it for a spring roll. You will know better.

The dessert menu is short, especially when compared to the pages and pages of mains and starters that go before, all divided up by origin and method (so tandoor dishes are listed on one page, classical dishes on another, noodles on another). To be honest, it was a bit of a relief; main courses and starters were so generous we were pretty stuffed by this point, and weren't up to hard decision-making. Dr W nearly went for something called Funky Pie, then changed his mind (if you go and order a Funky Pie, do let me know what it is - I'm intrigued), settling for Indian carrot cake (Gajar ka Halwa), all dense and moist and achingly sweet. I went for the crème brûlée, thrilled to see that they'd got the accents in the right place on the menu, and ended up wishing I'd had the saffron-poached pears instead - it tasted beautiful, but the acid from the mango had turned it into watery whey and curds under the crisp sugar crust. A single dud in an otherwise really enjoyable meal.

There are currently some promotions on the restaurant's website (click on the 'information' tab), which include a 10% discount for students. Without discounts, you're looking at around £5 for a starter. Mains start at £7.25 - the price rises steeply once you get into things like lobster, but starving students looking to impress attractive art historians should head on over, try for a table by the huge window so you can people-watch, tell them I sent you, and get ordering.

The Hind's Head, Bray, Berkshire, UK

Once a very quiet village about four miles from Windsor, Bray suddenly gained a lot of traffic around meal times when Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck (which you have doubtless heard of - it's regularly voted the very best restaurant in the UK, and fights each year with El Bulli in Spain for the title of best restaurant in the world) opened. Meal-time traffic, composed almost entirely of taxis from nearby train stations packed with salivating diners, has increased even further in the last five years, since Blumenthal bought the pub next door to the Fat Duck.

The Hind's Head menu is a showcase for what Blumenthal considers the very best of straightforward, traditional British cooking. Blumenthal's cooking at the Fat Duck (at £130 for the tasting menu without wine, you are going to have to wait until the ads on this site are paying a lot more before you can read about the Fat Duck here, so get clicking) is all crazy-wonderful, experimental, molecular stuff. I wandered over to inspect the menu on the day we visited the Hind's Head, and there was lots to appeal to the side of me that does the perfume writing as well as my foodie half. Oakmoss used as a flavouring, sprays of aldehydes, violet tarts, pine sherbert fountains - I breathed a heavy sigh and went back to the pub, words like 'straightforward', 'traditional' and 'British' boiling around in my head, convinced that I was bound to spend the evening wishing I was next door.

Sometimes I'm very happy to be proved totally wrong.

I think that the last completely uncritical review of a restaurant I wrote was posted here back in 2007, and I found it very difficult to write; roundly complimentary reviews of food make me sound, as I said back then, an unthinking and uncritical diner, and they are likely to be as boring as hell for you, the reader. (Un?)fortunately, the Hind's Head turns out to be another of these little bits of restaurant heaven. Even the menu prices were a delight, and the incredibly enthusiastic, very young waiter made our evening a real pleasure. I spent the meal looking for something to get ratty about, and I am proud to be able to give you one piece of fierce criticism. I do not like paper napkins.

Still and all - paper napkins in a pub are probably absolutely right, so you can probably scratch that.

This being a pub, you can grab a beer at the bar before you sit down. There's a short but good list of beers and a lengthy and very keenly priced wine list. We ended up with a bottle of 06 Bordeaux at £24 - it could have done with being cellared for a few years, but was terrific at the price. There are bar nibbles too - Scotch eggs made from quail's eggs, devils on horseback (prunes wrapped in bacon, secured with a toothpick and grilled - they're one of my favourite Edwardian savouries, and Blumenthal is very into his historical foods) and something called a Warwickshire Wizzler, which turned out to be a cocktail sausage which tasted as if it was made from the fatty flanks of angels, spiced heavily with sweet paprika. Our table of four spent a happy few minutes gumming our way through a selection of nibbly bits.

The menu presents you with a mixture of seasonal and traditional dishes. The asparagus is at its sweetest at the moment, and it was listed here with some free-range ham, cress, a dense Hollandaise and a rich, yolky pheasant's egg. (See the photo at the top of the page.) It was a simple and very generous presentation, which is precisely what you want with asparagus in May.

I ordered potted shrimp. Tiny, sweet, fresh, brown shrimp, peeled and poached in clarified butter with the traditional spike of mace and pepper, then set in a ramekin, were served just above room temperature with slices of brown toast. The butter was dense with flavour - had the shells and heads been used to flavour it? I've no idea, but I do know that this was far and away the best example of potted shrimp I've ever eaten. (The worst? That'll be the unseasoned, woolly pre-frozen white prawns in fridge-hard butter at Shepherd's in Pimlico.) I found myself unconsciously running a finger around the bottom of the ramekin when I'd finished. Dish-scraping was about to become a theme for the evening.

An excellent beef carpaccio, scattered judiciously with capers and shallots and dressed with a little parmesan, olive oil and lemon juice was a really lovely example of a dish that's often overseasoned; and a guineafowl terrine, gloriously spiced and seasoned, jewelled with pistachios, wrapped tightly in pancetta and served with shaved slivers of fresh apple and an apple compote, left a distressed Dr W scraping his empty plate with the back of a knife, trying to dislodge any remaining molecules of flavour. Starters over, all four of us started drumming at the table with our fingers to try to distract from the unseemly drooling.

The problem with a menu this good is that it's extraordinarily hard to make a decision. I went for the shut-eyes-and-jab-at-menu-with-finger approach, and ended up selecting a very dull-sounding main course - the T-bone steak - which I stuck with simply in order to try the sauce that came with it. This is a kitchen which has studied its classical French sauces, and the seared steak (a favourite cut, T-bone, with the softer tenderloin on the smaller side, and the tougher but more flavoursome strip loin on the larger) came with a little pot of sauce marchand de vin (butter, wine and dark beef stock), studded generously with little diamonds of rich, beefy bone marrow. Tipped over the steak, the marrow melted a little into the meat, the dense sauce so packed with flavour that thinking about it a few days later is giving me flavour hallucinations. I am alarmed to note that I found the whole thing almost viscerally sexy. Food shouldn't be this good.

The steak was accompanied with Blumenthal's famous thrice-cooked chips. (Fries for you Americans.) They're thick-cut, as pub chips should be, and boiled, chilled, and deep-fried twice. We ordered another bowl for the table - shatteringly crisp on the outside, and fluffy within. A good chip shouldn't be something to get terribly excited about (after all, Heston's chip method is very similar indeed to the one my Mum used when I was a kid), but the sad truth is that most English chips are, frankly, rubbish; it's very good to find some which haven't been frozen and shipped into the restaurant in giant catering bags.

Shepherd's pie with lamb shoulder, breast and sweetbreads was joyous. It arrived in a cast-iron cocotte, the top crusted with crisp potatoes. Inside was a dense, meaty, almost syrupy filling; the lamb breast gave the sauce a rich, jellied thickness, while the sweetbreads gave the whole an intense richness and a malevolent hint of offaly darkness. Happily, the friend who ordered this wasn't quite able to finish her very rich and generous portion, so her remaining pie filling was enjoyed by the rest of us, slathered all over those chips. This bowl got scraped clean too.

The serving and cooking temperature of foods, as we saw with the potted shrimp, is something that the kitchen here considers carefully, and salmon with shrimp and peas was cooked and served warm, not hot. The waiter made sure that the person eating it (James, who nearly choked to death on chillies in Montreal last year) was aware that it wouldn't come piping hot, and explained through one of Berkshire's biggest smiles that this is to ensure that the flavour is at its absolute best. I really like the service here. Befittingly for a pub, it's not very formal, but the staff are so enthused by what they're serving and by what's going on in the kitchen that their excitement translates to the diners. This was another seasonal triumph; more of those brown shrimp, sweet peas, flakingly moist salmon in a savoury marinade - simply gorgeous.

Chicken and leek pie, sitting in a sea of intensely savoury Mornay sauce thick with whole-grain mustard, was one of those dishes you could happily keep on snuffling down plate after plate of, until hustled out of the restaurant for revolting the other diners. Happily for those other diners, desert beckoned.

Blumenthal's a history buff, and the Quaking Pudding arrived with a little notecard (which I believe Ros has now pasted into her scrapbook) full of historical detail about wrapping things in guts and so forth. No guts were apparant here; Quaking Pudding was a delightfully wobblesome jellied milk pudding, a little like a panna cotta (and made in the same way, with milk and gelatine), flavoured with sweet spices like nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon. Unbelievably good (and far better than you could possibly imagine from looking at this photograph, which has an anticipatory thumb in the background) - I've been piling through my collection of old recipe books for a comparable recipe.

I'd seen Heston prepare his treacle tart with milk ice cream on television once (an exercise which ended with him milking a cow into a bowl full of liquid nitrogen). Utterly, unctuously, good stuff, crisp and squidgy all at once, with an intense, caramelised sweetness offset by a tiny sprinkle of fleur du sel. It was perfectly accompanied by the unassuming milk ice. And trifle - well, I wasn't allowed to try the trifle, which Dr W appeared to be trying to inhale.

All this, alongside a bottle of wine, several beers, a couple of cocktails, three dishes of nibbly bits, extra chips and a bowl of broccoli with anchovy and slivered almonds, still only rocked up at £60 a head. This is unbelievably good value for such exceptional dining, and it's a total delight to find that there's at least one restaurant in the country that's demonstrating that British food isn't all lung and slurry. All hail Heston - he's a one-man army changing the face of the British restaurant, and I hope you'll visit Bray soon to confirm it for yourselves.